Located amidst an urban garden in Guangzhou, China, Your Greenhouse Is Your Kitchen is a temporary pavilion designed by Office for Roundtable and JXY Studio. This structure integrates a greenhouse, outdoor kitchen, and social gathering space, creating an environment that facilitates community interaction through food.
Your Greenhouse Is Your Kitchen Technical Information
- Architects1-3: Office for Roundtable & JXY Studio
- Location: Guangzhou, China
- Completion Year: 2024
- Photographs: © Leyuan Li
Your Greenhouse Is Your Kitchen emerges as a spatial manifestation of food that proposes new sets of social norms and spatial politics.
– Office for Roundtable & JXY Studio Architects
Your Greenhouse Is Your Kitchen Photographs
Your Greenhouse Is Your Kitchen Material and Structural Innovation
The project examines food as a medium for agricultural and social interaction, reconsidering the relationship between the body, land, and urban life. It integrates farming and cooking into a shared experience. More than a structure, Your Greenhouse Is Your Kitchen explores the possibilities of collective food production and preparation in an urban context.
The pavilion is designed with adaptability and simplicity in mind. Constructed with angle steel and polycarbonate panels, it follows a modular system that allows for flexibility in use. Adjustable cables stabilize the panels at different heights, giving the structure a dynamic character.
The material choices contribute to lightness and permeability, allowing the structure to respond to environmental conditions. The transparency of the polycarbonate enables an interplay of light and shadow, reflecting seasonal changes. The inclusion of movable furniture, such as kitchen counters, vegetable racks, and folding tables, enhances adaptability. This approach challenges static notions of built environments.
Climate Responsiveness and Sustainable Strategies
The pavilion incorporates strategies to respond to Guangzhou’s subtropical climate. Passive cooling techniques, such as gaps between panels, allow for cross-ventilation and reduce heat accumulation while maintaining shading.
A rainwater collection and filtration system provides water for gardening and cooking. The project also contributes to soil remediation by using portable planting pots for vegetation growth. This self-sustaining environment integrates plants and human activity, supporting ecological processes in an urban setting.
Rethinking Public Space and Domesticity
The pavilion redefines public space in an urban setting. It removes boundaries between private and communal areas, proposing an alternative model of urban domesticity. Integrating farming, cooking, and gathering into a single space reinforces the connection between social and ecological systems.
Through collective food preparation and exchange, the project fosters new forms of social engagement that challenge conventional domestic rituals. This approach offers insights into urban living, where food production, sustainability, and communal spaces are closely linked. Your Greenhouse Is Your Kitchen functions as a space where architecture supports ecological and social interactions rather than imposing fixed definitions of use.
Your Greenhouse Is Your Kitchen Plans
Your Greenhouse Is Your Kitchen Image Gallery
About Office for Roundtable
Office for Roundtable is an interdisciplinary architecture and design practice founded by Leyuan Li. The studio focuses on adaptable, site-responsive projects that engage with ecological, social, and urban conditions. Through modular construction, material experimentation, and participatory design approaches, their work explores new spatial typologies that foster interaction between people and the built environment. Notable projects, such as Your Greenhouse Is Your Kitchen, reflect the studio’s interest in integrating sustainability and collective use into architectural practice.
About Office for Roundtable
JXY Studio, founded by Yue Xu and Jiaxun Xu, is an architecture and design practice that explores material innovation, spatial adaptability, and the relationship between built environments and social engagement. The studio’s work often integrates modular construction and flexible design strategies to create spaces that respond to both ecological and communal needs. Projects like Your Greenhouse Is Your Kitchen exemplify their approach to architecture as a dynamic and interactive medium, blurring the boundaries between nature, technology, and human experience.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Lead Architects: Leyuan Li (Office for Roundtable) and Yue Xu and Jiaxun Xu (JXY Studio)
- Design Team: Brandon Wunder, Xinyu Li, Shan Jiang, Efklides Tzimapitis, Ignis Zhang, Yufei Li, Xuelin Li
- Collaborators: FEI Arts, Design Trust
